Sony Announces Crazy-Thin 10-inch Xperia Tablet Z

Shawn Farner -

Consumers and members of the technology press alike regularly point to the iPad as a device that offers a big package in a relatively thin body. At 9.4 mm thick, Apple’s tablet is certainly worthy of that praise. The iPad isn’t the thinnest large-screen tablet, however. That honor currently belongs to Toshiba’s Excite 10 LE tablet (7.62 mm) but is about to be stripped away by Sony’s newest tablet, the Xperia Tablet Z, which comes in at a ridiculous 6.9 mm of thickness.

Simply whittling down a tablet to achieve such a thin profile seems impressive enough, but the Xperia Tablet Z also packs hardware inside that could deliver quite a punch and give other tablets a run for their money.

The Xperia Tablet Z will come running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. It’s not the absolute latest version of Jelly Bean (4.2 is running on the Nexus family of tablets), but it’s certainly usable. Inside, the Z is powered by a Qualcomm 1.5GHz quad-core APQ8064 processor, which should offer plenty of horsepower, and 2 GB of ram, which is about 1 GB more than you’ll likely find in many other tablets on the market. The screen boasts a resolution of 1920 by 1200 for a pixels-per-inch count of 226, which isn’t quite up to par with the iPad’s Retina display at 264, but will still look a lot better than most other comparably-sized Android tablets.

A few other features you’ll find on the device include:

  • 32 GB of flash storage
  • 8.1 megapixel camera
  • LTE capability
  • NFC radio
  • MicroSD slot for expandable memory
  • S-Force virtual surround sound

You’ll find all of this crammed into a device that is not only super-thin, but only weighs a hair under 1.1 lbs, which makes the Xperia Tablet Z not only the thinnest 10-incher on the market, but also the lightest.

There’s no word on pricing yet, but I’m guessing it falls somewhere in between $349 and $449, as it has to compete with both the iPad with Retina on the high end as well as the Nexus 10 (a fantastic piece of hardware in its own right) at $399. Sony also made no mention of when we might be expecting to see the Tablet Z, but since the cat is already out of the bag on the device’s specs, I’d expect to see it relatively soon.

What do you think of the Xperia Tablet Z?